1. Technical Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to statistical modeling and analysis. This invention relates specifically to the automated process of building, analyzing and creating a hierarchy of statistical models fit to a test data set.
2. Description of the Related Art
There has been a longstanding need for a method which would provide automated statistical analysis employable in a wide variety of applications, including detailed analysis of initial data mining results. The method would produce answers to several key questions, such as                a. How different factors affect the probability of a given event;        b. Which factors are most influential in determining the probability of a given event or the number of occurrences of a given event; and        c. How different factors affect the average number of occurrences of a specific event.        
Examples of these questions are:
How do race, age, and gender affect the probability that a person will suffer a heart attack before age 40? What is the probability for a particular profile?
How do age range, gender, education level, and work experience affect the probability that a person's income will fall into a particular salary range? What is the most determining factor for women in particular?
How many traffic accidents (per 5 year period) should we expect from a specific category of insured drivers? Which factor most heavily affects the expected number of accidents?
There are countless situations in which businesses and researches need answers to these or similar questions. In general, they have available only limited sample data to estimate the desired probabilities or average number of events. Unless generated using a large number of test cases, these sample statistics tend to reflect anomalies in the data rather than true probability trends.